Recover from hat-trick, and new work

3 weeks, 3 events, 3 countries - FOSDEM, CLT, OpenExpo - it was fun, work, long days and nobody can pay you such a great experience.
After all i needed some time to recover. I take some rest in the beautyfull Bad Reichenhall in Bayern.


And used my time to evangelize the people there and make some studies how a kid use the OLPC that i upgraded at OpenExpo. It is amazing with what pleasure kids discover the activities and how they are able to handle it without further knowledge.



Right now, i unpacked a charge of Fedora branded things - i tried out some new things to have more high quality produced swag. At the Moment this are rare unique prints and i will take it to surprise some people.

Open Expo Day 2

Today was our last Day at Open Expo. We were a strong team Fabian, Timea , Sandro, Frederic and finally Alan Cox and Jan Wildeboer. We all answered questions an encouraged people to work with us. A view minutes before i get a mail from a new contributor who want support Chitlesh with Fedora Electronic Lab.
Jan and i had conversations with OLPC.ch and arranged some contacts to support/start a project in Jericho. Because Jan brought his OLPC B1 with a newer SW Version as the OLPC B2 that we had, i decided to upgrade firmware and software to try the colaboration stuff, Alan crossed his Fingers and after a view workarounds both OLPC could work together. Even the formating process looks great. Max&Seth, you see your old OLPC get a second life :-)
All DVD´s, CD and many Flyers are given away - Fabian has the numbers. From the countless number of people with i had conversation at this day, there were around 10 People who will do something to support Fedora in some way. Yes, we need that "Join Fedora Station" and a coordinated mentoring to pick them up.
I had also interesting talks with business people and told them how they can participate to the Fedora Project and get benefit (not in Money counts) with it.
It is impossible to describe the fun and all the good things - that is somewhat you must experience by yourself. Find some pictures here.

Open Expo Day1

My personal event hat-trick - three big FOSS events in three weeks in three different countries - is almost finished.
I have little work in Bern, Switzerland to do related to my job, and so i am in the lucky position to support this event.
After a stormy trip from Stuttgart to Bern - btw. i started 04:00 AM at my place - i arrived at 07:30 to help Timea, Fabian, Sandro to polish the booth and start the day. As seen on FOSDEM and CLT the Posters are working fine. We had a nice little booth.


There was also a install zone where people could bring Hardware to fix problems or install Linux, and Sandro did a great job to help the people there.
Frederic from the Frankfurt RedHat Office brought us DVD´s and we switched him in a Fedora Contributor, put him in a Fedora Shirt and send him to help Sandro.



Later, Alan arrived and stayed with us almost the whole day, some of his masterpieces was a strange construct of Powerplugs to match the swiss electrical sockets


- maybe someone remember my own Power Plug Adventure ;-) - another one on the social event, he jailed google in a bottle jail, i am sure Fabian or Sandro who has taken pictures off it, can tell this story better then i.
The event itself was incredible, the area with exhibitors is larger then Linuxtag in Germany - and much much people, hope i get some numbers tomorrow.
We had good talks with visitors about our Fedora Project, but - they want to try it, "maybe" want use it - and are to shy to contribute to it. We gave away some DVD´s, LiveCD´s, Flyers and Stickers. I am sure, now there are a lot more people in Bern, Switzerland who know the role off the Fedora Project - in German there is metapher - constant dropping wears the stone. We achieved so much in the last weeks - Linux Magazin will bring a illustrated Story about Fedora EMEA, Robert will give a Podcast about Fedora in the next Weeks, and i had also a premiere, today was my first official interview with a guy from the University of Bern - i will keep you informed what happened with it. The social event - as expected not able to beat CLT ;-) - was nice and valorized with lightening talks.I am really look forward to the Open Expo Day 2 - the Community Day.

CLT08 Day2

CLT is over and i wished i could say we all arrived savely, but right now Jens Kuehnel makes a odysee accross Germany to reach Amsterdam in the netherlands latest tomorrow, because RedHat needs a trainer there! But Storm "Emma" destroyed the ways so he started at 01:00pm in Chemnitz - direction north - Leipzig - then further to Frankfurt Main - but much to late, because some ways are destroyed - so he must take a train to South of Germany Stuttgart to take a train direct to Amsterdam. What really angry is, i started with Robert Scheck at 06:00pm in the evening and reached Stuttgart two hours ago!

After all, like Jens said yesterday - if you want contribute on a OpenSource Event, never Start with CLT - you will compare every event with this "best of the best" organized events and don´t want miss it anymore. In the other hand, i can´t imagine to have a better start.

How was it? This event had the largest Debian presence i ever seen on a event.
So every time i spoke with people who showed potential to contribute to the Fedora Project they commited "oh i use (contribute) only (to) Debian i would only hear what you do" :(
Characteristic for Chemnitz is also, a high presence of women who are interested in Free Software - Chitlesh do you remember last year? And so i tried also to blabbing they in the Fedora Project but as before they use Debian, Ubuntu or one of the three BSD´s - geeky women! If you ask for potential of the "others", yes there is, but we need easier access as example for "Users" who want translate or do documentation work. Robert had his own little "install fest" with a guy who really needed his help. Jens gave his talk - and again i did´nt seen it.

See some pictures - and notice this event shows much potential for contributors and i would suggest to raise the presence next year. Btw. on the way to Trainstation a younger Shadow Man wearing a blue Fedora crossed our way - yes Fedora conquers the world :-)

CLT08 Stormy Day 1

Storm "Emma"(in Germany a Wether phenomenon is named) catched us right as we leave the hotel so we had a really wet stormy start in this great day.

Chemnitz is the former City "Karl-Marx-Stadt" and in front of the hotel there was a 3 Floor high Head of Karl Marx (!) - not sure what i should think about it.


First - hurray our fedora flag hung on the same place - so no trouble were to fear.
After placed the tech. Equipment - one Fedora 8 Laptop with Gnome, one Rawhide Laptop with KDE4, one OLPC B2 and a ALIX Board (close to the olpc hardware) wich is running Fedora.
We started a IRC Session on the KDE Laptop so the visitors could ask questions on the fedora-de channel - without knowing it visitors are allready using one main aspect in the Kommunikation of the FedoraProject - but we told them!
As a further aspect we started the Wiki with the "Join Fedora" Web-Page, not in german but in english because the german translation of this page is translated with the german courtliness-form to say a polite "you" (no idea how to explain this correct) and for the audience in Chemnitz this is a way to dissociate - so Fabian ;) we will discuss to find a way that match all - anyway thanks for your great work to translate all this stuff - as you see, we work on reinforcement - as example the two who asked you on IRC.
On the Booth we had all kind of people Students, Professors, Kids, EndUser, Developer, Admins ...
To hire them for Fedora is not easy, often i focused on the translation and artwork part of the project - i was happy that i had seen Dimitris Glezos Transifex talk last week - but this was surely not enough, so Fabian - i hope you get much questions and contributors. What we really achieved here? Much to less in form to get more committed contributors - but tomorrow is another chance!

I visited the OLPC talk of Christoph Derndorfer olpc.at and i was impressed about the work that they have done and how many non technical ideas are behind it - nice side effect he told me that he visited Boston in the last weeks and had lunch with Greg de Koenigsberg so always the same suspects ;-) Dear Reader, if you are a Package Maintainer for Fedora, there is a list wich Fedora Packages are on the OLPC , so look, maybe you have done more then you know for the OLPC Project. We had a 10 year old girl on the booth that was playing 30 min with the OLPC, then she found a application and asked me hey it is in english why is it not german i tryed to solve this whith sugar-control-panel - but it was not there, after a view minutes in the OLPC Wiki and a short chat with Dennis Gilmore we deside not to ruin the OLPC B2 with upgrading it to a newer version - because i need it in good shape in a view days on the OpenExpo in Bern to support Fabian on his Booth.

The social event was great as always - Menu 5 courses - great entertainment - i will look for some pictures.

Thanks to everyone who encouraged me - it helps me to work on my clumsy english ;-)